After several collaborative projects with Oren Ambarchi, Francis Plagne, James Rushford, and Leif Elggren, Beside Myself, just issued on Students of Decay, marks the first solo material that the nomadic sound artist, Crys Cole, has released in five years. Beside Myself finds Cole continuing to shape highly textural sounds through the subtlest of gestures. The album’s A-side piece, ‘The Nonsuch’, unfolds in a sort of hazy dream logic with vaguely recognizable sound sources derived from live performances, studio sessions, and field recordings breezing by and in-and-out of focus. On the other sidelong piece, ‘In Praise of Blandness: Chapter IX’, Cole’s voice, set to a slow-motion organ drone, plays a more prominent role as she reads an excerpt from François Julien’s book In Praise of Blandness. On the surface it all sounds rather straight-forward, but the piece becomes oddly arresting as you realize that Cole’s voice is slowly dissolving into an indecipherable blur, mirroring some of the key lines within the text. With Cole recently arriving in Berlin as the world essentially went on lockdown, we were able to connect with her via email and ask her a few questions about the making of Beside Myself. If you’d like to hear more about her previous solo and collaborative efforts, we encourage you to check out the podcast feature we did with her back in 2018. We also encourage you to check out the recordings that she has available on Bandcamp. With virtually all of her performances cancelled for the foreseeable future, any support you can show her is much-needed and greatly appreciated.

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First, before discussing your album, I feel that it is worth simply asking how you are doing right now with so much anxiety and uncertainty in our world. As someone who travels frequently, and who I know recently relocated to Berlin, how are things going for you? How has it been trying to resettle into a new city during a time where so many restrictions are currently in place. Are there any things that have been providing you with some solace or have you been too busy just trying to get your life up-and-running?

It is a very strange time indeed. We just returned to Berlin after 4 months abroad. I was in Melbourne working on a new Ora Clementi album with James Rushford through the winter and then Oren and I did a small tour in Oz, the USA and Canada. We thankfully made it back into Germany just 24 hours before they closed the borders! It’s an impossible time to get life back up-and-running right now, as all of Germany is locked-down as is basically everywhere. All upcoming concerts and projects are cancelled or postponed. For now, we’ve been living in our tiny (but thankfully bright) 2-room flat spending our days listening to music, keeping in touch with friends around the world and cooking delicious food. We both have projects to work on but haven’t figured out yet how to assemble a working space in our little shoebox yet.

You had mentioned to me when you were a guest on the Free Form Freakout podcast back in 2018 that you were slowly working on a new solo album. Is Beside Myself the material that you were referring to that you had been working on for an extended period of time?

Yes indeed. Both of the pieces on Beside Myself were born in 2015, and were developed over the last few years. The Nonsuch was developed through various live performances, which allowed me to develop new ideas and in the end I edited together some of the live recordings with studio recordings to create the finished piece for the album. In Praise… was performed only once. I was not really happy with the original recording so I spent a lot of time on post-production during 2017 and 2018 – small subtle details that really enhanced it – in order to get it to a place I was happy with.

The expression “beside myself” typically means something along the lines of being overcome with worry (how timely is that!), but you also hear in it this notion of thinking outside of yourself (again, how timely!). Can you explain the significance of the title of your new album?

I certainly couldn’t have imagined how fitting this title would be for this moment in time! I find titling my work very challenging. This one came to me in a flash…I was writing to my friend Francis Plagne one day and I referred to someone being ‘beside themselves’ about something. I immediately recognized how evocative this phrase is, and thinking aloud (so to speak) in the email I said “Beside Myself… maybe that would make a great title for my new album?” It just immediately felt right. The more I live with it the more I love it. I have always been very into word play and idioms, and with Beside Myself I feel that it lends itself to many interpretations that have compelling links to the music. The two pieces also feel very insular to me, extending from my mind and body in a very palpable way and I like the way that the title refers to being outside of oneself, yet it also implies being isolated with yourself in some way… who knew that this would be even more relevant given the state of the world at this moment in time.

The cover painting for Beside Myself by Melanie Rocan (Lace, 2018) is just beautiful and I think complements the sound work on the album so well. Was this created specifically for this release in mind or did you come across this painting and reach out to the artist?

I was determined to find something for the cover that had a strong connection to the tone and atmosphere of the music. I really wanted something abstract and textural, made by hand, and I had a colour palette of dark blues in my mind when I would listen to the pieces. I spent months looking at paintings by different artists from around the world looking for something that clicked. One day I checked the website of Melanie Rocan, an artist whose work I had seen in my hometown Winnipeg, as I remembered seeing a beautiful, gestural floral painting by her that I really enjoyed. I found Lace on her site and ‘bam!” Not only because of the tone and palette, but the imagery (the form) in the painting… it was just too perfect. We didn’t know each other but had mutual friends in the art community, so I wrote to her introducing myself and my work and explained how connected I found the painting to be to my pieces. Thankfully she was very open and also found the connection between the work really interesting and strong. I am so pleased that she agreed to the collaboration as I truly can’t imagine another cover for it now.

On the sidelong piece “In Praise of Blandness” you read a passage from François Julien’s book of the same title that explores the concepts of “blandness” in Taoist philosophy, in this case specific to their aesthetics of sound. This reading overlays a fairly static drone and your voice, over the course of the piece, gradually dissolves, echoing some of the concepts within the text itself. What was it about Julien’s text that resonated with you as a sound artist? Did you see this as a framework for composing this individual piece or do you find that these ideas speak more broadly to how you work with sound as a whole?

The concept for the piece actually came before I found the text. I was developing a piece for a live performance intended to illustrate the depth and value of nearly imperceptible changes, changes that take you from one place to another but through very subtle means. One of my favorite pieces of sound is ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’ by Alvin Lucier. I was thinking about the hypnotic effect of this very simple piece while developing my idea. I wanted to read a long text slowly, developing a sustained sonic state with minimal sources (organ and voice) – altering the state of the voice to the point where the words become inaudible (this was done live by mixing from a vocal mic to a throat mic and later enhanced through subtle post-production processing). It was imperative that the text I chose spoke to the process and the nature of the theme. I researched and read several essays and texts but nothing was quite right. Then one day I was recommended In Praise of Blandness by my friend James Rushford. It was exactly what I was looking for. It spoke beautifully to the concept of blandness as a state of transition, a neutral space essential for everything to exist and unfold (amongst much more). I related to many ideas in the book, and I was really taken by the chapters on sound and music. It wasn’t until I had performed and recorded the piece that I realized that the chapter I chose (on sound) was so closely describing the very process I was exploring in the piece!

I definitely relate Julien’s ideas in the book to my artistic approach, as Taoist philosophies have always resonated with me, but I wouldn’t say that this is an essential motivation in my work in general. I do feel that it has a very strong connection to not just the Blandness piece but to this record as a whole though.